Visiting Mumsnet is like having a right-on dinner party guest who wants
everyone to know she’s on maternity leave but is counting the days until she
can go back to work, writes Cristina Odone

Amanda Holden, the Britain’s Got Talent panellist, thought going back to work only three weeks after having a baby was the hardest thing she’d ever done. Wrong. Far, far harder was hearing what they said about her decision on the Mumsnet forum.

The anonymous mothers piled in with comments that, Amanda bleated, were “negative” and “judgmental”. They ridiculed her show, questioned her parenting and filled her with guilt. Simon Cowell is a sugarplum by comparison.

Poor little Amanda. She didn’t know the nature of the Mumsnet beast. She dreamed of “a support network for mums”, a country kitchen where she’d be spoon-fed coochy-coo comments about her baby’s dimples and tips on maternity nurses.

What she stumbled into, instead, was a north London Starbucks where angry women sit among laptops and prams, venting their frustration. In their Ugg boots and baggy sweatshirts, the haggard-faced mothers attack their keyboards, tapping out their angry message to the world. It boils down to Lauren Cooper’s catchphrase: “You disrespecting me?!”

Amanda Holden is right about Mumsnet. Its 600,000 registered users are more judgmental than a Fifties suburban housewife, more negative than a BBC commentator discussing Tory cuts. I know, because I too have been at the receiving end of these angry women.

When the Centre for Policy Studies published What Women Really Want, my pamphlet on working women, three years ago, Mumsnet invited me to do a webchat. I was more terrified of their questions than of Jeremy Paxman’s on Newsnight: I’d seen how they had mauled Gina Ford, the child guru, and clawed David Cameron’s eyes out (“Leave your hair alone and answer the damn questions,” one barked at the Conservative leader).

Within seconds of my going online, they came at me, stilettos (not of the Jimmy Choo variety) drawn: how dare I say that women longed to stay at home with their babies? What kind of a traitor was I to argue that most mothers preferred part-time work to being CEO?

Ironically, the one thing they had in common, the mummy label, was the one thing they did not rate. Most sounded as if they'd been raised in a Left-leaning, “a woman’s place is in the boardroom”, world. They’d learnt to equate work outside the home with satisfaction and work within, with drudgery. When they slipped from a proper salaried job to a limbo without kudos or pay, they burned with resentment.

Others would have loved to obsess about their “DD” and “DH” (darling daughter and darling husband, as per the site’s acronyms); but sensed that outsiders held their non-job in contempt. They felt frustrated by the huge gap between their faith in the family and the official line.

Mumsnet brings together these angry women. They love it because it gives them a fig leaf of professional respectability: unlike gossiping by the swings in the park, Mumsnet requires a professional prop, in the shape of a laptop, smartphone or computer. And unlike swapping cracked nipple tales over tea and digestives, the site connects mothers to the outside world (by golly, even to politicians) as well as to one another.

Motherhood can be lonely. A go-to site for women struggling with potty training, nut allergies and sex while pregnant offers a much-needed service. When Mumsnet offers practical tips, new mothers must feel they’ve found Calpol for the soul. But most of the time, visiting the site is like having a right-on dinner party guest who wants everyone to know she’s on maternity leave but is counting the days until she can go back to work. And who won’t let anyone else get a word in as she splutters about the loneliness, isolation and boredom of raising children.